About Me

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

The Return Of Butch And Sundance

In the past
this blog has referred to “Shanghai Lil’s” as a satirical take on the local
branch of HSBC. Like other banks they
are not as they used to be decades ago when banking was taken seriously and
deposits were twenty per cent of assets held.

It hinted
that compared to the past there was a slightly raffish, almost personal way
they tried to flog you their financial products. The charming young ladies and jolly young men
are very different from the rather older, often grumpy and distant male clerks
of the past.

One of my
acquaintances however has other opinions about HSBC. Once it took him three weeks to move his
money from one account of his own to another as hurdle after hurdle was put in
his way. The assistants sighed sadly
when they told him that this was necessary to avoid money laundering and other
frauds.

What made
matters worse was that the savings account he had held for a long while was
earning a derisory 0.5%. In the Marks
and Spencer shop along the street he picked up a leaflet offering 3.5% for a
similar savings scheme. The small print
told him that the account was based on HSBC.
The word “fraud” leapt to his mind.

It was not
as though he was one of the flirts or easily bored of their customers, moving
from bank to bank on a whim of a marginal rate of interest. He had banked with HSBC and its predecessor Midland for over fifty
years. When a man like this looks
askance at the service he gets it tells you a lot.

The trouble
is looking for another. Barclays? Oh dear.
RBS? Oh dear oh dear.
LloydsHBOS? Oh dear oh dear oh
dear. And so it goes on. If he had a bit of money then perhaps Coutts,
the posh end of RBS? Not so fast on the
trigger, Butch, this is a frame up.
Coutts is now effectively based in the Caymans catering for a certain
class of people.

Amongst
them may well be the famous financier once at the centre of Labour’s financial
policy, Fred Goodwin. A vintage ten bob
note, now out of circulation, suggests that a certain very high placed Scottish
person who is acutely sensitive about issues relating to his personal finances
is another.

There are
more distinguished persons associated with Coutts, quite a few celebrities and
others with a longer connection. Does
one really want to have people like this standing in the same queue at the
branch in The Strand? HSBC have a
presence in The Caymans, hence the picture of the Cayman Crocodile above.

HSBC, as we
know, have fallen foul of American investigators. They are the sort of person who likes to go
into detail, wants to hear the explanations and wants another notch on the butt
of successful prosecutions. The
particular question is large scale money laundering, notably from Mexico
where the trade is associated with large scale homicide.

So what has
been going on in London, accused of being the money laundering centre of the
world, clearing house for a network of tax havens moving bad money from account
to account at the speed of light, if not Higgs Boson? We shall never know. Too many are too close both to the government
as well as the opposition.

Long ago, I
was in the gallery at the Bow Street Stipendiary Magistrates Court where
several of my acquaintances were due in the dock to be asked why they had
trashed a number of clip joints in Soho. This had caused distress to their owners and
senior police officers on their payrolls.

They did
not appear as one of the punters who had been debagged was a Cabinet Minister
and the charges were hastily dropped.
But one poor hapless soul, called up from the cells had been seen by a
police officer to take tuppence (two old pennies) from a telephone box. He was handed down a month in prison.

2 comments:

That's the problem with banks - are any of them any better than the pack? Outfits such as the dear old Co-op ought to be, but who knows? They seem to be more interested in the environment than banking.

Noel Coward's "Bad Times are just around the corner..." still seems pertinent and is worth a read or a listen. Better to smile than despair, and I have smiled a lot thank you. Even further back is Stanley Holloway's "Al-bert and the Li-on". There's nothing new really. Sombody's always "got to be summonsed". No-one who is guilty will take the blame.